Hooked to the Handset

If everyone has five vital organs, she has six: brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, liver and her mobile phone. She walks, talks, even goes to the washroom with the gadget fixed to her mouth, ears or hands. "I'm listening,” she says, every time there's a lull in conversation because she's checking her phone or laughing at a text. If told she's on it too much, she fights with the fury of a tigress: "It's from office.” Or she tries to do it covertly, under the table. Sometimes she looks for her phone frantically, only to realise it's in her hand. And sometimes she thinks her phone's buzzing, but there's really no call or text. Good God, her friends say, she's so boring.

You may not know but you are probably having an affair with your cell phone. It's what you wake up to and fall asleep with. You look at it 150 times a day on an average: to talk, text, mail, chat, browse Twitter or Facebook. And also to play games, watch movies, consume news, change songs, take pictures, go to apps, shop online, tell the time, plug or unplug. You read, send or check text messages 23 times in your 16 waking hours. You make, receive, miss, drop or avoid calls 22 times every day. And every time, the sound of your phone floods your brain with the same chemicals that are unleashed by the proximity of a loved one. But what if you start loving your object of desire a bit too much?

That's the latest buzz among doctors. In the midst of a mobile phone explosion, India is witnessing a rising tide of 'mobile phone addicts', people who have fallen so hopelessly in love with their handsets that it's taking a profound toll on their behaviour, health and life. Psychologists and practitioners of community medicine are trying to understand the mysterious relationship between a cell phone and its owner's ardour. A raft of studies is coming out in learned journals. And India's first clinic to treat mobile phone addiction has just come up at the country's top school for mental disorders: the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) in Bangalore.

Our mobile lover might be boring, but she is not alone: She is a face among India's 900 million mobile users-the world's second-largest, after China. And one of 15 per cent Indians who spend three hours a day to view 70 per cent internet pages via mobile. If four hours is the average time Indians spend on their phones a day (compared to 2.5 hours in the US), she uses it much more, like 68 per cent users who confess to be addicted to their phones. And like 43 per cent of them, she too would try to save her plastic love first in an emergency.

Is it really akin to drug and alcohol addiction? Or is it just casual talk, an attempt to medicalise everyday behaviour? No. Experts are dead serious about this. "Some people find it so pleasurable to use mobile phones that they keep using it. Their behaviour harms them or others and still they can't stop, just like any other addiction,” says clinical psychologist Dr Manoj Kumar Sharma, who leads the NIMHANS centre, SHUT (Clinic Service for Healthy Use of Technology.) "MRI scans have shown that many compulsive behaviours light up the same pleasure centres in the brain in almost the same way as drug or alcohol dependencies.” Mobile phone addiction may soon get included in the Bible for psychiatric illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Right now it is listed in the appendix for further research.

Who gets hooked? Anyone: the thrill-seeker, the depressed, the stressed-out, the lonely, who feel the urge to be connected. "For many, it's a tool to cope with bad moods,” says Dr Ritu Nehra, clinical psychologist with PGIMER, Chandigarh. "That's what 70 per cent of 200 undergraduate students we studied in 2012 said. Nearly 50 per cent felt 'incomplete' without it.” The addiction does not cause obvious physical problems but can lead to serious psychological issues, she explains: from anxiety, sleeplessness to neglecting studies or job to drifting away from close ties.

It was first in 2011 that Sharma started getting queries from parents and schools on the excessive use of mobile phones among teenagers. He wasn't surprised. With digitally nimble teens taking to mobile phones, what used to be the rush to the school canteen to tell everyone what's going on has become the rush to the handset to spill and share secrets. In a June 2014 study by Tata Consultancy Services, 71 per cent of 12,300 students across 12 cities called it their "favourite gadget”. The mobile phone is a key tool that determines how they live, work and play. In May this year, a Class XII student of a Gurgaon school committed suicide after she was chided by her teacher for texting messages in class. In June 2013, a 16-year-old fell off a local train in Mumbai. She was too busy speaking on her mobile phone.

Most parents approach the NIMHANS clinic either because academic grades have started to drop or sudden behaviour changes have been detected. Typically, what begins as an hour-long daily activity-internet, gaming, social media-spirals into an obsession that consumes six to seven hours a day or more. The child tries not to go to school, avoids friends, family outings, food and sleep. Anger, aggression, irritability are seen when they are forced to part with their phones. When they start avoiding conversation and eye contact, parents come running: "I am losing my child.” "Children like the freedom, anonymity and innovative thrills of the virtual world,” Sharma says. "But the line between reality and its simulations can blur dangerously.”

Scientists are busy classifying the range of phone addiction they observe: from nomophobia, the fear of having no mobile phones, to textaphrenia, or thinking that a message has arrived when it hasn't, to textiety, or panic attacks over not receiving or sending text messages. When Dr Sanjay Dixit, professor and head of community medicine at the MGM Medical College in Indore, conducted a study on 200 MBBS students in 2009, he found that nine out of 10 showed some form of phone addiction: 56 per cent kept mobile phones close to their body to be in constant touch with it, 93 per cent got panic attacks when they did not get messages, 42 per cent suffered from disturbed sleep due to excessive phone use, and 19 per cent had painful thumbs due to over-texting. "It's truly a new evolutionary twist to the gadget Alexander Graham Bell had engineered,” he says. "The addiction comes from your fear that something enormously important will happen while you are out of reach and that you won't be able to react,” says Dixit. Needless to say, it's an exaggerated fear.

In the privacy of the mobile phone, all kinds of behavioural addictions thrive. Sample a 35-year-old Bangalore mother's case. Two years ago, she quit her job to stay at home with her four-year-old son, as her husband had a transferable job. She felt crushed by loneliness and boredom. But she did find an emotional outlet-the games on her smartphone. She couldn't seem to stay away. Soon, she was telling herself she would do it for an hour or two at the end of the day, but she would wind up gaming all night. "When you're in that state, you're not thinking clearly,” she says. It took her son-as he started picking up her habits-to sound the alarm. "If he gets hooked on to the phone at this age, I don't know how I'll live with myself,” she remembers thinking. She called Sharma and went through intensive therapy. She hasn't checked a gaming site since.

Her story nods to the fact that therapy can be effective. That's a relief at a time mobile phones, with ever-expanding frills and features, burrow deeper into our lives and the sceptre of addiction stalks a talkative nation. With therapy catching up with science, doctors are detailing lists of things that can be done to combat the technology disorder. One often-suggested solution is to step away from the phone for a while and connect with nature. The other is to make sure you get a full night's sleep, apart from forbidding technology at the dinner table. The bottom line is: bring in a sense of balance and be aware. Mobile phone addiction is not fatal and by using a few simple strategies to resettle your brain you can live happily ever after even with your mobile phone.

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